The Deloitte Football Money League has a US-shaped hole
With NWSL clubs conspicuously absent and European revenues inflated by allocated funds, the latest rankings offer a distorted view of where the real money lies in women’s football.
The latest Deloitte Football Money League, published on Monday, has become the primary measure of financial growth in the women’s game – for better or worse.
Better, because all transparency is good transparency, if you know what you’re looking at.
Worse, because the latest Deloitte rankings offer a warped version of reality – one that makes Europe appear as the financial powerhouse of women’s club football.
As with the previous editions of Deloitte’s women’s football power rankings, NWSL clubs are conspicuously absent from the list. Deloitte said that the financial data of NWSL clubs “was not made available to us and so is not included in our analysis”. The same applies for clubs in Australia and Sweden.
Had NWSL clubs kindly sent their data across, Deloitte’s rankings – and thus their overall analysis of the women’s game – would look very different.
In July last year, US sports business outlet Sportico produced a set of highly educated estimates for NWSL club revenues in 2024, detailing them within a reasonable margin of error. Using these estimates alongside Deloitte’s research, the NWSL’s Kansas City Current would be ranked as the world’s richest women’s football club, closely followed by Angel City in a comfortable second place.
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